Spanish: Las cien vidas del filósofo Sócrates, trans. Sara Álvarez Pérez, Madrid: Errata Naturae Editores, 2013, 64 pp.

Turkish: Sokrates Karanlıktan Çıkıyor, trans. Akın Terzi, İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2014, 64 pp.

German: Sokrates verlässt das Reich der Schatten, trans. Thomas Laugstien, Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag, 2016, 64 pp.

A sacred ship from Delos arrives in Athens on its return from a mission to the Temple of Apollo. While the citizens enjoy the festival of the Delia, an imprisoned Socrates prepares to drink poison hemlock, as required by his sentence. After death, his soul joins a queue of others who prepare to appear before the three judges personifying the three parts of the psyche – a many-headed bronze beast (desires and pleasures), a silver lion (justice) and a golden man (the reason). There Socrates meets an old acquaintance, the sophist Thrasymachus. 

As a judgment for their behaviour when they were alive, the philosopher receives one-thousand years of pleasure in heaven and the sophist one-thousand years of suffering in the abyss. When the time comes, they both head to the Goddess of Destiny and her daughters, the Fates, to choose a new fate. But before returning to earth, both Thrasymachus and Socrates break the rules by not drinking the water of oblivion, therefore remembering their previous experiences. In the first rebirth, the sophist repeats his desire for glory, wealth and power, but Socrates, who became a mosquito, stings him at every unjust act. Thus, they have to live through another millennium of retribution. 

Then Socrates suggests to Thrasymachus that he can escape another thousand years of torture by choosing the ideal just city for his soul, a place that his friend Plato once told him about. However, the sophist again tries to cheat fate. In the second reincarnation, Socrates is a dog belonging to Homer, with whom they find themselves in Plato’s utopian Kallipolis. When children (together with a musician Damon) enrage the poet by talking about the usefulness of poetry and its necessary correlation to the knowledge of things, Socrates and Homer wind up in a quiet alley where they meet Thrasymachus, this time as an artisan, a member of the class of Producers. From him, they learn some rules of the ideal state, such as the distribution of children into three groups according to 1. the metal which prevails in their soul (bronze, silver or gold), 2. the inability to change the assigned rank or 3. to choose a partner from a different group. The Guardians teach them about extensive education in Kallipolis – the most gifted students master dialectics – an art that allows discerning genuine truth. Thinking that after fifty years of study, a person would be physically unfit, Homer and Thrasymachus decide to capture the queen for ransom. Along with Socrates, the dog, they learn first-hand that the governors of the ideal state are as strong as they are wise: when the kidnapping fails, all three find themselves once again among the souls of the dead.

During another millennium of punishment, Thrasymachus (this time accompanied by Homer) decides to take revenge on Socrates by setting him up for life in a Cave, where the only true element is the shadows on the walls. Socrates succeeds in breaking free from his shackles and escaping from the Cave. However, he discovers that what seemed real to him was engineered by illusionists. Having gradually become accustomed to the light, Socrates decides to free the other inhabitants of the Cave, but they refuse, preferring the shadow to the light. The philosopher’s soul once again lives justly, while the soul of Thrasymachus, a tyrant in this incarnation, is sent after death to Tartarus, the cruelest and darkest part of the Underworld.

The subtitle, “d’après La République de Platon”, is placed in brackets on the book's title page but not on the cover. Several fragments of the classical text form the basis of the plot and determine its main characters and idea: the most influential in this regard are the passages on the immortality of the soul (608d–612) and its tripartite structure (588b–e), the myth of Er (614a–621d), and the allegory of the Cave (514a–520a). As the story is driven by the sequence of lives and afterlives of the main characters, it may be understood as an essential, implicit reference to Cephalus’ words: “when a man begins to realize that he is going to die, he is filled with apprehensions and concern about matters that before did not occur to him. The tales that are told of the world below and how the men who have done wrong here must pay the penalty there, though he may have laughed them down hitherto, then begin to torture his soul with the doubt that there may be some truth in them”* (330d–e). The concept of the perfect state in Marchand’s book is rather marginal. Therefore its main theme isn’t society or politics, but justice, which, according to Diogenes Laërtius, also appears in the second title of Plato’s dialogue – Περὶ δικαίου [Peri dikaiou] (On Justice, cf. D. L. III.60). 

However, the short story abandons Plato’s method: the theme of the righteousness of the soul is revealed not through the example of the whole state (сf. 369a), i.e., reasoning from the greater to the lesser, but rather through individual examples of the lead characters, Socrates and Thrasymachus. From the ancient text, only these two maintain their significance in the new plot, assuming the roles of a protagonist and antagonist, respectively. There is no mention of Cephalus, Polemarchus Adeimantus, and Glaucon. In turn, some other characters mentioned by Plato appear in Marchand’s book with the main figures, in particular Homer, Damon the musician, the Goddess of Destiny and the three Judges, who represent the three parts of the soul – a many-headed bronze beast seeking pleasure, a silver lion representing justice and a golden man personifying reason. Unlike the ancient text, here, parts of the soul are first identified with the metals of which the soul is composed (the coloured illustrations also support this) and second, they function as the Three Judges of the Underworld.

The book has an entirely different structure than Plato’s dialogue. Instead, it starts with the philosopher's death, leading to his rebirth in other reincarnations. The further sequence of themes also does not correspond to the classical text. Using new combinations of fragments, Marсhand creates a mosaic. The allusions in the short story may be mapped as follows: a transition from Plato’s book I with the themes of afterlife and justice (330d–338b) to books X and IX, concerning the immortality and the structure of the soul (611a–621d; 580d–583b), then to book I on the justice understood as the power of the strongest, according to Thrasymachus (336b–d, 338c, 343c, 344c, 348c–349a), and – when the characters get to Kallipolis – to books III (403d–417b), II (376e) and IV (489c–493a) on the education and daily life in the perfect state followed by references to book V (455b–d), when discussing the role of women. Subsequently, book X (595a–611a) is the main source for the fragment with an enraged Homer (also cf. 379d–e of book II), book VII, the Platonic dialectics (531d–535a) and the allegory of the Cave (514a–520a), book VI, the Sun representing the Good (504е–509с), book VIII describes the soul of a tyrant (562a–564c) and finally book X (615c–616a), the story of the tyrant, Ardiaeos.

The plot involves three reincarnations of Socrates and Thrasymachus and, more specifically, the aspiration of Socrates to improve Trasymachus’ soul during his attempts to escape his millennial punishment after another unjust life. Therefore, the conflict between these “frenemies” is clearly related to Socrates’ words in Plato’s section 498c–d: “Do not try to breed a quarrel between me and Thrasymachus, who have just become friends and were not enemies before either. For we will spare no effort until we either convince him and the rest or achieve something that will profit them when they come to that life in which they will be born again and meet with such discussions as these.” That is why the results of their metempsychosis take on a special symbolism. During the first reincarnation, Thrasymachus turns out to be an orator, so eager for money and the people’s sympathy that he is even willing to defend a criminal during the trial. At the same time, Socrates appears as a gadfly, which suggests a parallel first, to his words in Plato’s text (“[the tyrannized soul is] always perforce driven and drawn by the gadfly of desire it will be full of confusion and repentance,” 577e), and second, to a passage from the Apology of Socrates, in which he compares himself to μύωψ ([muops], “gadfly”), a gadfly required for a horse that “needs to be aroused by stinging”** (Plat. Apol. 30e). 

In the second rebirth, already in the ideal Kallipolis, Thrasymachus becomes an artisan producing beds, making it possible to explain the concept of the three classes and the theory of Forms and characterise him as a man whose soul is predominantly composed of iron and copper. These metals correspond to the bronze colour of the pleasure-seeking, multi-headed animal part of the soul depicted in the book. This again determines his pursuit of the fake Good, e.g., the attempt to kidnap the queen for ransom. It is worth noting, however, that in Marchand’s book, the producer-Thrasymachus states that his parents predetermined his class and he could not have been anything else (p. 41), whereas according to Plato, children may have a different concentration of metals in their soul and thus may belong to a different group (415b–d). In this life, Socrates is Homer’s dog. This is significant because he often exclaims “νὴ τὸν κύνα!” ([ne ton kuna], “by the dog!”). Also, because in Laws, Plato states that poets compared philosophers to “dogs howling at the moon”*** when they tried to explain celestial phenomena using reason (XII 967b–c). Nevertheless, the philosopher is, here, a seeing-eye dog for the blind poet (both literally and metaphorically).

Finally, the last described reincarnation explains the metaphor in the title of the book. From what shadows does Socrates step out, and where does he go? This time, Thrasymachus lives as a tyrant, and the philosopher becomes an inhabitant of the Cave. Despite all the obstacles, Socrates stays true to his quest for truth (or the Sun as the Good, cf. 507e–508d) and manages to leave the Сave and see things as they are. Both characters are rejected by society. They find themselves back in the netherworld, Socrates because of his desire for enlightenment, Thrasymachus because of his need for false values. The first will get another reward, and the second will be sent to Tartarus. This book is about rising from darkness to light through justice and wisdom. Dialectics become the right tool to see things in their genuine Form. 

As in Yan Marchand’s other books, there is a lot of valuable cultural details. For instance, Marchand mentions that Socrates respects his death sentence by drinking a poison hemlock infusion; a celebration in honour of Apollo and a mission to Delos unfolds as a background, and Sophocles – also appearing in Plato’s text (cf. 329b–d) – is mentioned (although at the time he was already dead). Plato himself is mentioned, among others, as Socrates’ friend and author of the idea of the most-just city (p. 32). Thus, the children’s story receives an element of meta-textuality and becomes not only an adaptation of the dialogue but also a book about it. 

* All quotations from: Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6, trans. Paul Shorey, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1969. Available online in the Perseus Digital Library (accessed: November 26, 2021).

** Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1966. Available online in the Perseus Digital Library (accessed: November 26, 2021).

*** Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 10 & 11, trans. R.G. Bury, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967, 1968. Available online in the Perseus Digital Library (accessed: November 26, 2021).

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